


Ex Obscuris Lux

by teethnbone



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 10:59:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10762896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teethnbone/pseuds/teethnbone
Summary: Here’s a truck stop instead of Saint Peter’s. Or, alternately: Agent Scully and the terrible, horrible, semi-annual crisis of faith.





	Ex Obscuris Lux

**Author's Note:**

> Post Je Souhaite, pre Requiem. One more for the road.

 Tagline: 

**FROM DARKNESS, LIGHT**

 ______________________________________________________

“I’ll know it when I see it,” he says.

Mulder is doubled-over a filing cabinet, chewing his thumbnail. He’s combing obscure message boards. He’s knocking over mugs and clipping tabloids and dog-earring library books and making one hell of a mess. Impatiently gold-panning the temporal for some flake of the sublime.

Cows and horses sleep standing up so they don’t expend energy getting back on their feet. Scully restocks pipette tips in the lab and empties the recycling and is careful not to start any task that cannot be quickly abandoned. She considers making a request for megafauna this time: something singular. Something that mauls, or, better still, something that lurks at the edges; eviscerating pets and worrying the townsfolk. Something that doesn’t sting. Or swarm. Or carry an unregistered handgun. It’s been a long March.

Mulder is anachoretic on office days: hunched in the backwoods of the Bureau with his maps and his slides and his notes. The Jane Goodall of things with eyestalks. His mania reminds her of logging trails, of strip mining. Careless disorder in the wake of some momentary pursuit. The story of their lives, of late: his shoulder deliberately bumping hers in a crowded elevator, or the overnight bag she leaves on the passenger seat of her car for all the world to see. They have both been growing decidedly less careful...

On Monday he asked if he could drive her to work. They were standing in the grey light of her kitchen at 5:30AM and Mulder asked it with his back to her, while he watched the microwave spin yesterday’s coffee. Asked it without looking at her, as if to spare them both the eye contact when she refused.

Scully thinks the line is just where it always was...except lately it is more of a charcoal smudge. The more she squints the more its edges blur. She can’t help but feel they are taking unnecessary risks. Driving a Faustian bargain.

______________________________________________________

 

“Bingo,” Mulder says reverently to his open book.

He’s been pinned to the the same leather tome for hours, hunched like a supplicant. Propped up on his elbows, fingers in his hair, a Ticonderoga clenched between his teeth like a civil war soldier prepped for amputation.

He looks blearily across the desk at her and a smile gathers behind his eyes, even as his pupils refocus for distance. Enthusiasm thrums off him in waves, reverberating back against the filing cabinets and the ceiling tiles, competing with the ambient fluorescent hum of the office. Scully makes a concerted effort to look him in the eye, rather than at the bit-gag of the pencil in his mouth.

His book looks like it should be behind glass somewhere. Some grimoire, she thinks. The Picatrix. The Book of the Damned. The Necronomicon. Machen’s Great Green Ledger. Where does he even get books that old?

She makes note of her page number in JAMA before closing it, and Mulder extracts the pencil from between his teeth and his smile coalesces.

“Skyquakes, Scully.”

“Mulder I believe we, as a society, have solved that one. ‘Thunder’, we decided to call it.”

He waves her off. “Skyquakes,” he repeats, thumping the open book with his eraser, “The Guns of Fog in North Carolina. The big boom at Seneca Lake. The Colossi of Memnon. NOAA’s Julia. The Moodus Noises in Connecticut. Native Americans called the area ‘Matchetmadosett’, the place of noises. Italians call the phenomena ‘brontidi’, like thunder. Except that it occurs in clear weather and more closely resembles the firing of cannons. Reports are pouring in.”

Dunning-Kruger, she thinks. Anosognosia. Idée fixe. After all these years there are still conversations that make her wonder if he’s mentally ill.

“Mulder,” she says, and she remembers a training she attended once, on voice modulation in crisis negotiation... “Mulder, what you’re describing is thunder. Or tectonic plates shifting. Or natural gas purging. Or frankly, any sound wave altered past the point of recognition. The doppler effect or atmospheric conditions distorting some pedestrian source. A fireworks display. A Jet engine. Big rigs on an overpass.”

“Or,” he says with import.

“Or any one of a dozen other plausibles.”

“ _Or_ ,” he presses meaningfully. “Something up there is making cannon-y noises.” He slides a folder her way.

It’s a recycled file, labeled once before and since crossed out: ~~ANKOU - WINNIPEG / DAYTON, Dec ‘91~~. The handwriting isn’t Mulder’s, but it’s one she recognizes from a handful of documents that survived The Great Fire. Something from before her time. And, she remembers, a hand that has outlived its originator.

The file is empty save for two waxy tickets for the 3:15 Vermonter.

Once more into the breach, Scully thinks: north-bound for Ilium, for Arkham, for Jerusalem's Lot. Some Swamp Yankee hears a garage door close and in sweep the Feds: guns drawn, tilting at windmills. Ladies and gentlemen, your tax dollars at work. Did Sisyphus curse the stone or the hill?

______________________________________________________

 

Mulder makes a fatal error and hands over the rest of the file while they wait on the through platform. He probably thought she’d read it in transit, but Amtrak is experiencing delays in Newport News and Scully peruses the eyewitness accounts with mounting incredulity. Anger rises like heartburn in her throat. It dawns on her that skyquakes were a red herring; one without which he would never have got her this far.

She snaps the file closed in disbelief. Mulder is looking carefully elsewhere, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Squidmen, Mulder.”

He winces and tilts his head noncommittally. “Well…”

“Tentacled humanoids.”

“No...” he equivocates, “Well, okay yes. But--”

“Face tentacles. That’s what this says, Mulder. Humans? But with tentacles instead of a face. Or am I misunderstanding?”

“That’s...I mean _essentially_ , but hear me out--”

“Mulder, do _you_ ever worry that you’re insane?”

He taps his skull cap. “Think I should have gone with the transorbital?”

She passes the file back in disgust and pinches the bridge of her nose. It is starting to sleet. Somewhere up the tracks there’s a deep note like the dirge of a foghorn, and with it the next logical doubt occurs to her.

“Did Skinner clear any of this?”

Mulder clears his throat as a stall. “I’m sure he’ll sign off retroactively.”

The joke if it is, he’s right. The AD’s been using kid-gloves ever since she returned from Cote D'ivoire. Besides, Mulder on a case is a hound after a hare: spirit-driven, crashing through creeks and vaulting over field and forest. Surging forward and circling back. Swift-footed, wild-eyed, and keening out a deep, incomprehensible longing: a root-flame in the heart, the echoes of it knocking dimly back against the low-ceilinged corridors of hospitals and police stations. An inexorable, magnetic howl. Who is she, to ask Skinner to resist that cry? Over the years they have both learned that the key to wrangling Mulder is knowing when to choke-up on the leash and when to let out slack.

She thinks he is probably the worst investigator she has ever known, and also the greatest. All of his profiles are a priori, all his working theories apopheniac, all his case reports muddled by hindsight and a creeping determinism. Renegading around with his lockpick kit and his leather jacket, cracking Columbus’ Egg and drawing outside the Nine Dots. Tromping all over the Fourth Amendment and following no rules of logic but his own... It is both what she loves about him and what she finds most maddening: what makes her want to work with him, and, perhaps even more, to knock him down a few pegs.

All flirting aside, she suspects it is this tension that has lent their working relationship a touch of the paraphilic from day one. Not a competitiveness per se, more of a perverse jockeying. Two weltanschauungs, riffing back and forth in the darkness. Dueling banjos in the reality tunnel.

“Mulder, those police reports are decades old.”

One side of his collar is turned up against his ear in the wind. He has the decency to look a little browbeaten.

“Train's here,” he says, gesturing up the rails with his chin.

__________________

Before my drift-wood fire I sit,  
And see, with every waif I burn,  
Old dreams and fancies coloring it,  
And folly’s unlaid ghosts return.

\- John Greenleaf Whittier  
__________________

 

Mulder watches the landscape play out like a silent film. Beside him he can feel Scully watching it too, and he wonders what her intertitles say, and if she’s still mad at him.

They wind their way north through Baltimore, through canyons of brick row houses, and Mulder feels a swell of affection, like looking back on a first date. Maybe he’ll dream up some excuse to take her to Camden Yards this summer...

The train cuts a fault-line up the East Coast: past great grey tundras of shipping yards and shopping mall parking lots, through subterranean tunnels and graffitied underpasses, all hemmed in by miles on miles of chain link fence. Cities rise up on the horizon, loom larger until they fill the window and then fall suddenly away. A parade of great grey ghosts on the skyline. The two of them sit unnaturally still, hypnotized by the view.

They cross the Susquehanna at Havre de Grace, pass Gander Hill Prison, where Mulder supposes Marty Glenn is still housed, though he has not heard from her in years. Skirt Paterson, where the sky over the marsh is a radioactive winter orange. Bound for the Connecticut River Valley, Mulder thinks. Where Winifred Benham was thrice tried and thrice acquitted on charges of witchcraft. A woman who survived, against all odds.

Gradually the lush landscape of the Mid-Atlantic gives way to muted fallow, like a time-lapse of a spring day on rewind; the forsythia dying away and the ferns furling back into the wet earth.

“Scully, how come we never take the train?” he wonders aloud, entranced by the world through the window and by her reflection in it.

“Because someone keeps picking cases in LA...” she reminds him fractiously.

The armrest between them is doing a pretty half-assed job of partitioning, more like the suggestion of a barrier, and he’s getting the sense that the hatchet may be mid-burial because her knee is resting companionably against his IT band. She smells chemical, like hormones and epoxy. Like huffing glue. Mulder can practically feel his neurons dying off in euphoric pulses from the fumes.

“Sayreville,” she non sequiturs, cutting through his brain fog and pointing past him out the window. “God, Mulder, remember that? You were so close to quitting...”

He does remember: the long, dark days and the smell of blackwater. Remembers blasting Skinner in front of a room full of suits, and dragging Scully out to some bench by the reflecting pool to sulk after-hours. Threatening churlishly to go rogue.

“What an asshole…” he says, a little disgusted. 

Beside him she huffs a little laugh that sounds like agreement. “I really thought you were going to walk away,” she admits, looked past him at a dystopian Jersey. “Just as I was starting to understand...”

__________________

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,  
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools, singing at night,  
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire,  
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one  
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,  
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,  
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

\- Sara Teasdale

__________________

 

April in New England is God-forsaken, Scully thinks. Spring in name only.

“We’re looking for a white mailbox...” he informs her, easing the rental down a road that’s more mud than gravel. “No number.”

“Home of?”

“Thomas Hollis,” Mulder slurs sideways around a mouthful of PowerBar. “Owner of 65 acres. Presently cultivating some 18-20. Woke up to find the western half of his 80 foot high tunnel mysteriously demo-ed in the night. That same night neighbors as far as a mile away report hearing..." he points a finger at her, inviting her to fill in the blank.

Scully sighs. "Booms, I would expect."

Mulder gives her a thumbs up. "You're damn right. The Tri-Town attributed the damage to a ‘dry microburst’, but Mr. Hollis is understandably doubtful. Also there’s pictures,” he points with the bar to an envelope that’s been sliding back and forth on the dash.

Scully thumbs through the photos. She wonders on the status of Hollis’s probable insurance claim, and what Specified Perils might be covered in a farm building policy. Probably not microbursts.

“Well,” she says, “There are well-documented instances of localized downdrafts felling trees and power lines...”

It would seem she’s a meteorologist this week. A generalist at heart, she’s always considered interdisciplinary dabbling one of the job’s few perks: right up there with the frequent flyer miles and the handsome pariah. This past year she has read-up on Palindromic Repeats, and reciprocal food sharing in vampire bats. Researched Madgeburg Hemispheres and sleep deprivation and sealskins. And, for the case Mulder has on the back-burner she has analyzed Herodotus’s perfect method; brushed-up on evisceration and the alkaline properties of hydrated soda ash.

Mulder attempts a scoffing sound. He is trying valiantly to unstick his rear molars with his tongue, the acute angle of his jaw clenching and unclenching. He’s overdue for a shave, his generally squared-off sideburn blurring into beard stubble like a ramp gradient, and Scully thinks about secondary sex characteristics: antlers alight with peach-fuzz and birds of paradise flitting manically in the dense jungles of New Guinea. How funny it is, to ascribe sexual value to some arbitrary feature. And, on the flip-side, how tragic. That within her some latent biological instinct is making guesses as to the genomic feasibility of (impossible) offspring, based solely on Mulder’s comely phenome: his strong jaw-line and the dull roar of his five-o’clock shadow.

“You know,” she starts, hoping her own voice will shake her from distraction, “If you turn on the Weather Channel you’ll find ample evidence to support the theory that regular old run-of-the mill meteorological events do _occasionally_ occur. It’s not all blood rain and toads out there.”

“Ahh,” he says, balling-up the aluminum wrapper in his fist and raising a cautionary finger. “But regular old meteorological events don’t leave behind goo.”

“Goo.”

“Yeah, goo. The cops found it all over the polycarbonate and all over the ground and everywhere.”

She narrows her eyes. “Mulder, how about from now on you lead with the squidmen and the goo. Save us both some time.”

“Duly noted,” he says, making a left at the white mailbox.

______________________________________________________

 

Mulder parks in a set of muddy tire-ruts and leaves his sunglasses on the seat where he’ll probably sit on them later. He can tell by the way Scully slams her car door that he is treading very thin ice.

He watches her sidestep a huddle of fat grey geese that have gathered to investigate the rental’s hubcaps. The birds look ill-tempered, and he considers telling her so, but Scully is a scientist, and therefore opposed to anthropomorphism on principle.

She surveys the farm, right hand on her hip in a way that might appear casual if you didn’t know about the P-228 concealed there at a 15 degree cant. The geese honk anxiously to one another as if they suspect she’s packing. Oh thin men of Haddam, Mulder thinks, feeling heat rise up in his belly.

They set off single-file, down an aisle bordered on either side by ghostly white row-cover, picking their way towards the buckled greenhouse at the edge of the field. Half of it sits square and untouched and the other half is pancaked: a tangle of galvanized steel bent at irregular angles. It looks stepped-on, Mulder thinks.

On the phone earlier Hollis had been taciturn and unceremonious; displaying a particular gruffness of character that made Mulder feel both tetchy and nostalgic. New England hospitality, Scully called it. He always associated it with friends of his father.

At one edge of the lot a yellow farmhouse with a wrap-around porch is rotting into oblivion, its paint alligatoring nastily. A thresher rusts in the driveway, and beyond that a neighbor’s weathered silver barn is being slowly reclaimed by the bittersweet. Its roof is partially caved-in, and it weeps asphalt shingles and splintered rafters. Wait. Caved-out?

Mulder stops in his tracks.

“Right behind you,” he calls, detouring.

Scully turns on a dime. “Seriously, Mulder?”

“Two minutes,” he assures her, taking off at a jog. “Cover for me.”

He sprints across the field towards the lilting, gambrel-roofed monstrosity, his ankles turning in the tilled soil. At the property line he hops the fence, then circles the barn’s perimeter looking for access. The day is eerily quiet, and there is a scent on the wind that reminds him of every bloated cow carcass he has ever known.

The barn doors are barred with 2x8s but there’s a ladder to the hayloft and he takes the rungs two at a time, his heart going like a freight train.

At the top he is knocked dumb by the stench. It’s corporeal and rank and he buries his face in his elbow and grits his teeth. Holding his breath he puts a shoulder to the crossbuck doors, but they’re painted shut and he can’t get enough leverage from the top of the ladder.

Christ, the smell! He gasps for air over his shoulder and sees something red stirring at the base of the farmhouse: a man in a ballcap and faded bibs emerging heavily from the bulkhead stairs.

He gives the doors a final, fruitless shove, then descends, rung by rung, back to earth.

  
__________________

Did sudden lift of fog reveal  
Arcadia’s vales of song and spring,  
And did I pass, with grazing keel,  
The rocks whereon the sirens sing?

\--John Greenleaf Whittier  
__________________

 

Mulder ducks at the threshold of the greenhouse and surfaces within its geometric skeleton. Inside the light is diffuse, like a bed sheet thrown over the sun. He looks up at the run of peaked ceiling that is still intact, the high jointed play of glass and metal. Goethe called architecture frozen music.

He does a peripheral sweep for either Scully or goo, and comes up short - dry-gulched by the sight of her.

In the milky light her wool jacket is luminescent: black on black on black, and against it her hair is fresh lava on volcanic rock. She’s examining the label on a tray of baby lettuces, her frame curved earthward like a living, breathing silhouette.

Mulder swallows and feels something sarkic unfurl behind his ribs. The air between them is pointelized with humidity and unbidden he thinks of sublimation, transmutation, his own personal religious awakening. Who knows, he thinks, a few more years of pining celibacy and he might very well have reached enlightenment...

Then she turns to face him and her eyes find his and suddenly there is very little holy about what he is feeling. Perhaps there never was. Close your mouth, he thinks.

He is dimly aware that he’s staring: adrift in dangerous waters, but the sirens are screaming now, the sails luff in place and there’s no one left to take the helm. Mayday, he thinks distantly.

Scully takes one long, even-keeled look at him, and then jots her head a fractional degree, her eyes narrowing the way a cat smiles.

Then she turns away from him, towards Tom Hollis, who’s bulky frame fills the doorway.

______________________________________________________

 

The farmer is younger than Scully would have guessed. He has a non-rhotic drawl and a curly, Levon Helms beard, and a wisp of a daughter hanging shyly at his waist. Scully guesses the girl to be five, maybe six, her skinny wrists sticking out from the sleeves of her Carhartt like she’s mid-growth spurt. She stumbles after her father with her fingers in his belt loops, peering up at them with unmistakable infatuation.

Mulder is asking only leading questions. The day is turning colder instead of warmer and Scully feels her shoulders begin to ache from the way she’s been hunching them.

“And you... you heard absolutely nothing that night?” Mulder queries.

“Nothing,” Hollis confirms plainly.

He appears supremely uninterested in any of it, and Scully is beginning to understand why. The farmer’s answers paint a grim picture: a damaged greenhouse only the latest in a string of misfortunes. The mortgage payments are piling up. The soil is rocky. The Deere needs a new injector pump and the girl’s mother seems to have been out of the picture for some time.

The man looks exhausted and speaks bluntly: answering Mulder’s questions with either a yessir or a nosir, volunteering plenty of woe but little in the way of paranormal explanation. Scully remembers this from their days on the Fertilizer Front: the weary pragmatism of the people living in the shadow of the farm crisis.

She and Mulder don gloves and fills evidence bags with broken glass, though none of the shards they collects look the least bit gooey. She looks around at the grey fields and the dilapidated houses and feels a psychic chill creep over her. Even Mulder is starting to look a little under the weather. 

______________________________________________________

 

By the time Scully finishes labeling ziplock bags in indelible ink Mulder is feeling decidedly off.

Half an hour later he pulls over on some god-forsaken stretch of 202 and is sick on the side of the road. Violently sick: hunched over the plow-sand and rock salt remnants of winter, gagging uncontrollably, his body desperate to rid itself of all contents.

There is sweat in his eyes, and when he closes them he sees flashes of green-black light: frost heaves buckling a back road. Torn muscle hanging slack from the bone. Brackish water flowing downhill and something hatching in the darkness. He can’t remember ever being sick like this.

Scully gets out and leans against the car, standing near but not too near, a stabilizing hand on his middle back. She keeps her eyes fixed on the staggered beige soundwalls at the edge of the highway. There was a time, years ago, when he would have been embarrassed. Would have walked up the road, or asked her to get back in the car.

He spits and waits, hands on his knees, for the next wave to hit him. “Stomach of steel,” he says, curling a bicep at her weakly.

“Mmm,” she murmurs, gazing calmly into middle distance, “Cast iron.”

Everything is spinning but her hand on his back is mercifully still. A physician’s empathy.

A passing car honks merrily. The back of his neck is hot.

“The Kuba of Central Africa believe the god Mbombo began the universe by vomiting,” he tells the ground. “Sun. Earth. Animals. Just barfed up the whole mess.” He feels his stomach roil. “Ex nihilo” he adds. “Something from nothing. The RigVeda calls it ‘the germ of spirit’. Infinite regression. Turtles all the way down.”

He thinks he’s probably rambling. He is willing to entertain the possibility that this is slightly embarrassing.

“Nausea,” Scully counters, “Is etymologically linked to sea-sickness. Derived from the ancient Greek ‘naus’, meaning vessel or ship. ”

Mulder spits again and considers this. There is bile at the back of his throat, and he wonders at how much it tastes like the sea. “That barn was a fortress,” he tells her. “Doors double-barred, plywood on the windows...”

Scully shrugs. “So the neighbor locks his barn. He probably doesn’t want Hollis’s daughter near the RoundUp.”

“There was something bad in there, Scully.”

“Yes Mulder, and it has a name. Glyphosate. Metam Sodium. Atrazine. You’re suffering from chemical poisoning.”

Maybe, he thinks. But that wouldn't explain the booms.

Scully squints up the highway. “If you’ve been exposed to organophosphate pesticides we should get you to a hospital…”

“I’ll be fine,” he says. “I’m travelling with a Medical Doctor.”

Pulsing waves obscure his vision, converging towards a fixed center. He blinks them away. “We should do some digging. Find out who pays the property taxes on that barn. Damn, Scully, I would kill to see what busted out of there...”

She thumps his back with a closed fist. “You done, Shiva?”

He stands, closing his eyes against a head rush and wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “And on the Seventh Day, God rested.”

“Keys,” she says, holding out her hand.

__________________

Far more than all I dared to dream,  
Unsought before my door I see;  
On wings of fire and steeds of steam  
The world’s great wonders come to me

\- Emily Dickinson  
__________________

 

Scully takes full advantage of her time behind the wheel: she flips on the wiper fluid, clearing the windshield of salt. She futzes with all of his mirrors. She hovers exactly 9 miles-per-hour over the speed limit, and when the gas gauge hits the quarter mark she takes the next exit.

At the pump she kills the engine and turns in her seat, putting a cool wrist to his forehead.

“Fever,” she says, like she’s talking into her tape recorder in a morgue.

“All through the night,” Mulder adds agreeably. “I feel better, actually.”

“Go find yourself some electrolytes,” she instructs him.

In the falling darkness the storefront glows with the light of a thousand suns: neon beer logos humming like bug zappers in the dirty plate glass. A handful of teenagers loiter by the doors, smoking cigarettes and tapping shoulders. They let Mulder pass unmolested, their law enforcement spidey senses probably tingling.

Inside it smells like powdered donuts. Lotto tickets hang in spools behind the counter and a handwritten sign taped to the register reads “Bless all dogs”.

Mulder stands in front of the freezers and scans the rainbow of sports drinks, feeling woozy. He marvels at the sheer variety on display, and wonders about the part of the human brain that might once have been reserved for cataloging nuts and berries: an encephalic rolodex of edible and inedible flora, cross-indexed by shape and size and color. Now stuffed full of brand names.

He chooses a bottle at random, feeling contagious. He wishes he could find a place to wash his hands. Maybe autoclave them. The drink is a nuclear yellow that reminds him, ironically, of dehydration.

In line he waits behind a teenager in black Chippewa’s. The kid death-grips a pair of Steel Reserve tallboys, one in each hand, like a set of free weights he’s about to curl. He bounces on the high heels of his boots, wallet chain a-rattle. He might as well have a sign that says “ID me”.

Mulder scans the display under the counter for breath mints and from the recesses an ancient cache is tripped: Scully emptying a box of Dots on his desk blotter to explain Kepler orbits. Her body bent over his desk like a military strategist with a map; arranging polychromatic planets and rattling off the equation for finding the inverse square as she increased the r value between lemon and lime.

“The forces are either attractive or repulsive,” she told him.

He frowned at the waxy drops and tried to translate them to algebra. Back then he’d been fascinated by her past: by the Newtonian trajectory her life might have taken before Quantico and before medicine...innumerable Scully multiverses and elsewhens that were both fascinating and heartbreaking to imagine.

“Are those my only options?”

“This is how you calculate potential gravity,” she said, ignoring him. “It’s the basis for Lagrangian mechanics. The catalyst for the Enlightenment.”

It was the first time he had ever heard her sound like a woman in love.

“Are you going to math with all of those?” he asked.

Scully passed him a red without looking up. He remembers the way the gum drop marred the center of her hand, like candy stigmata. Remembers it as a revelation.

It feels like something that happened ages ago. Like something that might have happened yesterday.

The fates have been merciful: the kid with the 40’s is spared. He settles up and beats a hasty retreat, and behind the counter the convenience clerk clears his throat impatiently. Mulder steps forward, wondering if she would prefer CowTales or Black Crows.

______________________________________________________

 

Scully stands pumping gas. She tries to concentrate on the pulsing sensation of the gasoline coursing up from the ground underneath her hand, pretending it’s herself she’s re-fueling instead of the car. It’s an old relaxation technique, one she’s employed at countless gas stations over the years. A willing suspension of disbelief that placebos her into a better, more adept frame of mind.

She starts at the sound of keys jangling, but when she looks down she finds it wasn’t keys after all but dog-tags: a beagle puppy sniffs curiously at her pants leg as if she’s some inanimate part of the landscape. She sets the trigger lock on the pump and bends to scratch the dog’s black saddle and it leans against her shin and sneers in ecstasy.

Behind her the sun is setting below a ridge and the world is inky and pigment dyed, thrust into shadow. All around her the high points of the trees and the soffits of the buildings reflect the last familiar rays of a light earthward: refracted gold on a blue world.

When she lifts her hand from the beagle’s back he flops ridiculously by her feet, fawning up at her and presenting his vulnerable underbelly.

Scully gives in and takes a knee, reacquainting herself with the mechanics of dog-petting: following the seam of hair under his ears, down his shoulders, between his bent forelegs and along his hot belly. Maybe she’ll get another dog one day, she thinks. She’ll let Mulder name it. Let him take it for runs after work.

For a moment she feels opaque, a shimmering protoplasm through which any passerby might easily peer and see past her body to the black of the asphalt. She is emptied and hollow, the wind passing through her. The dog’s abdomen is hot under her hand and the dusk is gold and blue and violet. She waits for the moment to pass but it remains. Time, Einstein said, is what keeps everything from happening at once.

She watches Mulder cross the parking lot towards her, a Gatorade in one hand and a fistful of candy in the other.

Scully is frozen, looking at the world through slow glass. Time is dilating: Mulder is striding towards the car and she is petting a puppy and somehow when she looks up again Mulder is still striding. They are two clocks moving relative to one another. A Lorentzian distribution.

Then the frame rate quickens abruptly to normal speed and Mulder flops against the passenger door beside her. The color is coming back to his face, she notes with some relief. He sighs thoughtfully and watches the digital numbers of the pump display change.

“Who’s your friend?” he asks, looking slantwise at the dog.

She checks the tags but they’re vaccination records. “He’s nobody,” she says.

She thumps the puppy’s chest and it squints at the sky upside down, then sneezes violently onto her hand.

“I see you’re setting yourself up for more gastric success...” she says, nodding at his haul.

“What’s the expression? Feed a cold, starve a fever, eat candy until you puke again?” He’s staring at her hand on the dog like he’s observing open-heart surgery. “I feel better,” he repeats absently, sounding distracted.

Scully grasps for slow time but the moment has passed. It must have been the gasoline fumes, she rationalizes. A fleeting benzene high.

Above her shoulder the pump thunks as it cuts-off. She stands, and both Mulder and the puppy shift disappointedly as she screws the cap back on the gas tank.

“You look better,” she admits, studying his face.

Mulder follows the path of her hand to his forehead until his eyes cross. He lets her take his temperature again, lets her tilt his face to the light so she can coax his pupils into dilating. He smiles because she’s holding him by the chin and does something suggestive with his eyebrows.

“Does this mean I’m cleared to drive, doctor?”

“Yeah,” she says. Time is crunching back on itself like a melodeon. “You can drive.” 

_________________

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it.”

\- William Faulkner

_________________

The car is a warm bubble of isolation barreling along in the near dark. She considers telling Mulder to slow down, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that just as she has nine lives, he is forever blessed speeding.

“Dink’s Song” jangles tinnily on the radio and Mulder navigates at 8 and 4, thumping the underside of the steering column in percussive company, his monotone ill-suited for Bob’s sand and glue chorus. He does seem better.

Scully un-focuses her eyes at the windshield and considers the puppy and her own deep separateness. Separateness from him, from the other cars surging forward in her periphery, from the rocky outcroppings and groves of pitch pine blighted by water towers and suburban sprawl. It is something she feels often, and something she cannot explain: this unresolved otherness. “The people” Van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother, “Seem very sensitive to the changing seasons”. We live as we dream, she thinks. Alone.

How is one supposed to reconcile it, she wonders? This unholy dichotomy: a world that is bent and bloody and writhing with nightmare, but despite all that, the feeling she sometimes gets standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in the whirlwind. What is the nature of reality? How can it encompass light and dark so seamlessly? And if God did indeed create man in his own divine image, what then was the impetus for parasitic microbes?

“You’re depersonalizing,” Mulder cautions, scrutinizing her from the driver’s seat.

“Eyes on the road,” she reminds him.

Mulder shakes his head ruefully. “You get cognitive dissonance the way other people get hayfever, Scully”

“I do not.”

“You do. Like clockwork every spring. Want me to pull-over if we pass a tattoo place?”

Philadelphia is still a nonunion; a bone of contention she suspects was never set correctly. She weighs her options and chooses not to respond.

They are both quiet, watching the cat’s eyes of the road reflectors tick past, marking space and the time it takes them to pass through space.

“How do you rationalize an incongruent reality?” she asks, having forgotten she isn’t talking to him.

“Haven’t you been listening all these years? You can’t rationalize the ineffable. That isn’t the point.”

“What is the point?” she asks, not specifically of him.

“Who is John Galt?” Mulder quips unhelpfully.

He probably doesn’t understand the question. Mulder makes the leap innately, she thinks. His fixation with the bizarre is linked, inexplicably, to a kind of pious wonder. There’s wonder in all of it for him: wonder in sunspots, wonder in star jelly, wonder in the Iranian Bubak and the Kentucky meat shower. He does not feel a cognitive dissonance, she thinks, because for him a universe in which there are squidmen is a universe in perfect harmony. His own anarchic anima mundi: chock full of hagfish and horseshoe crabs and held up by the gnarled columns of anthills.

Melissa had sent her a scrap of a poem years ago, something torn from a page of The New Yorker. “Instructions for Living: Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.” Mulder’s career goals, she thought the first time she read it.

“Scully, look!” he blurts, stuttering the brakes and jarring her out of reverie.

He hooks a perilous right, nosing the car up to a hinged barrier gate and killing the headlights. Before them is a field, vast and black, and the night sky above it is bright with airglow and made concave by contrast.

The impetus for his aside, she sees, is glowingly apparent.

Silver orbs dot the field: luminous freckles on the flat expanse. They look like jellyfish. Like spots of phosphorescence in a vast ocean.

Mulder makes an attempt for his door, forgets he’s wearing a seatbelt and is caught up short like a dog on a chain. He sheds it and is off, careening into the night.

Underfoot the grass is sharp and woody, the tips shorn white from last year’s hay cut. Scully crouches over a wispy bundle, admiring the way the tangle of proteinaceous strands catch the starlight like mica mixed into a city sidewalk. She searches her coat pockets for a pen or a latex glove. Mulder is probably finger-painting with the stuff...

“Spider webs!” she calls preemptively into the void. “Possibly those of the barn funnel weaver...”

Somewhere in the near-dark Mulder snorts derisively. “Come on, Scully, I know angel hair when I see it.”

She stands and scans the perimeter of the field, flashlight sweeping the vegetative wall of kudzu at the treeline. She does not know what she is looking for. Beside her Mulder materializes out of the dark, wiping his hands on his pants.

“When are you _not_ in possession of a flashlight?” he asks, impressed.

She turns to face him and he squints and covers his face against the brightness.

“Mulder,” she says thoughtfully, lowering the Maglight, “What am I doing here?”

“Here here?” he clarifies. “In this field here?”

“No,” she says. “Here in the broader sense.”

“Ah,” Mulder says, as if he was expecting this. “Well...” he starts and then stops to think.

She can barely see the shape of him in the dark, can just make out the way his hand goes to the top of his head, like he’s bottling something up within himself. Tamping-down on his unease.

“Let’s see,” he says. “You’re cataloguing the heretofore uncatalogued. Classifying the unclassifiable. Shining the light of reason into the darkest and mustiest of corners...”

Mulder’s hand feels in the dark for hers, and when he finds it he presses the thumb covering the Mag’s rubber switch-seal and the bulb springs off.

“Doing autopsies,” he says, leaning in and bumping his forehead to hers. “Righting cosmic wrongs. Kicking ass. Taking names.”

This really is his wheelhouse, Scully thinks. A darkened field, the illusory shimmer of goo in the moonlight, and the occasion for a rambling, cajoling pep-talk. “Wrap it up,” she warns him, because Mulder will ad-lib all night if she lets him. 

“I can try and write up a formal JD if you want, but in summation I’d say you’re sort of the backbone of this operation.”

“There are days I feel ancillary to it.”

“Scully,” he says, sounding hurt. “You’re vital to it.”

“I’m not _vital_ , Mulder. The X-Files did not always employ a token cynic.”

“Well,” he admits carefully. “No. But I-I think we’ve benefitted from a change in staffing strategy.”

“Mulder, how is it that at our last performance review all you could talk about was ectoplasm, but here, debatably surrounded by it, you’re suddenly fluent in corporatese? And what benefit are you referring to? Has our department cleared more cases since I came onboard? Do we ever actually right any wrongs? Do you feel closer to the truth these days, or farther from it?”

“See,” Mulder says. “Like right now. I need you around to raise all these thorny questions.”

“I feel like all I do is raise questions,” she says honestly. “And I can’t remember the last time I actually got an answer.”

“What do you want answered, Scully?”

She considers. “What we’re here looking for,” she says. “The overall significance of what we’re looking for. How skyquakes and squids fit into some greater narrative.” How any of our cases these days fit into some greater narrative, she thinks, but does not say aloud.

“Well,” Mulder says. He sounds a little worried. “As to your primary query. I guess I would posit that this case presents.... Or that the evidence suggests... What historically has indicated the presence... of Globsters.” He kicks the ground. “Possibly,” he hems, as an afterthought.

Christ, she thinks. He should be worried.

“Globsters are bunk, Mulder. They’re whale blubber. Cetaceous remains in advanced states of decomposition that wash up on beaches and are subsequently discovered by drunk tourists. There are no such things as globsters. And even if there were, they’d live in the ocean, not in the hinterlands of New Hampshire. And if, _somehow_ , against all reason, they did live in these woods: so what? How does that advance our work? You see, so the question remains: what are we doing here? What is the point of this case? What is the point of any of our cases?”

“Scully,” he says, his tone teasing and terribly sad. “Is this your two weeks notice?”

She sighs. A discerning ear can measure Fox Mulder’s ambient inner turmoil by monitoring dialectical shifts: when didactic monologues give way to a kind of clipped, telegraphese it’s DEFcon 2. DEFcon 1 is hoarse-throated shouting.

“Because you’re supposed to submit it in writing...” he adds miserably.

They are both too adept at talking in circles, she thinks. Rambling their way through every discussion, like Padgett and his terrible run-on sentences. She remembers the way the stranger knelt on top of her, the way his fingers strained horribly at her thorax. One day, when she does leave the X-Files, for whatever reason, she knows it will tear Mulder’s heart out.

“I’m not quitting,” she tells him testily. “I know this is important to you. I’m trying to reconcile how I fit into it.”

He hears him exhale a breath she didn’t know he was holding. “I guess I figured it was important to both of us.”

“Mulder, there is nothing important to me about globsters.”

“Okay, maybe not the globsters. But I think you have to accept that you’re drawn to the search, Scully. Even if you don’t believe all the things I believe... I know you enjoy the process.”

“Maybe,” she admits. “But I guess I still think of it as your search at the end of the day.”

“Hmm,” he says thoughtfully. “Maybe you have to cast aside the jug to see the water?” He slips icy hands into her coat pockets. “I forgot my gloves,” he offers lamely, as if he needs an excuse.

“Mulder, if you think we’re getting it on in a field of angel hair you are mistaken on more than one count.”

“I harbor no such delusions,” he assures her, though there is a roughness to his voice that would suggest otherwise. He huffs hot air into the collar of her jacket and stamps his feet restlessly in the cold like a reindeer.

Mulder’s middle name is entropy and she basks in his latent heat loss: the contrast of the warmth in front of her and the cold night at her back. He is pyretic: a focused beam of light, and she is reminded of his fever. Of Clausias and the net transfer of energy. The beam of a magnifying glass. This one goes to eleven, she thinks.

She dips key-cold fingers between his stomach and the waistband of his jeans and hears him swallow reflexively.

“Mulder,” she says into the unzipped V of his fleece.

“Mmm?”

“Globsters aside, I do think of our work as important. I’m not leaving.”

He hums against her neck, sounding unconvinced.

“Mulder?”

“Mmm.”

“I'm promising.”

“Good.” he says lamely. “Because I don’t know who else I’d convince to run the labs on all this angel hair.”

The road at the edge of the field is silent, and somehow the nearby interstate is also mute. They have stepped into another world, Scully thinks. Some Brigadoon through the mist. She smells frost on the wind, and underneath it loam.

“For the record...” she says softly, and as her lips brush his ear a frisson passes over him. Someone is walking over his grave. “...Those are spider webs.”

  
__________________

During my education,  
It was announced to me  
That gravitation, stumbling,  
Fell from an apple tree

Mortality is fatal—  
Gentility is fine,  
Rascality, heroic,  
Insolvency, sublime

The trumpet, sir, shall wake them,  
In dreams I see them rise,  
Each with a solemn musket  
A marching to the skies

\- Emily Dickinson  
__________________

 

They tromp back to the car, Mulder’s hand hanging heavy on her shoulder. At the edge of the field he stops abruptly, and she watches him kneel and gently scrape a bit of ichor into an empty Milk Duds carton. He stands and folds the box closed. Pockets it. Gives her a solemn nod.

Back in the office Mulder will put the box on a shelf like a reliquary and there it will stay: sandwiched between a jackalope skull and the pair of decaying dice; just below his infamous, guaranteed authentic Mar’s rock. Gathering dust.

In the months to come Scully will look up at it and remember the way the frozen world crunched under her feet. She will think about family heirlooms: her father’s wristwatch and her grandmother's worn, kitchen block quilts. She will think about globsters and legacies, and about the bizarre farrago she and Mulder amassed over the years.

And she will imagine taking each artifact down from the shelf and passing it gently into small hands: to an old-soul sitting cross legged at her feet. Someone percipient and wide-eyed and held rapt with wonder.

__________________

I had a man  
Who was long and tall  
Moved his body  
Like a cannonball

\- Bob Dylan  
__________________

 

After the chill of the night the forced hot air in her motel room is like a choke-hold.

She tosses her gun on a chair and Mulder pulls off his t-shirt and slumps wearily against the wall by the door, watching her peel off her socks.

He puts his hands behind his back and slouches there: still and white against the wood panelling like a man made of marble. He’s waiting for her, she realizes. Liminal. Holding out for her tacit agreement.

Work is work, and motel rooms have always been off limits. An unspoken rule, etched in stone. Until tonight, apparently.

She thinks she might be able to square sex on the job if it were reconciliatory, but she’s not sure what exactly they’d be reconciling this time. Similarly, she might play along if she could just blame Mulder for initiating things, but he seems to be decidedly unwilling to play the fall-guy. She watches him holding up the wall: arms pinned behind him like he’s handcuffed.

There is no reasoning for it. No backwards logic. No justification. It’s something she wants, even though she knows it’s a package deal: the sex and the inevitable feeling of foreboding that follows. The fear of fallout. Of needless risk. The creeping sense that they see but through a glass darkly, and that some day, in hindsight, the cost of their infractions will be horribly clear. The suspicion she cannot shake: that they are marching gamely towards the cannon’s mouth.

The living statue that is Mulder breaks character and folds his arms over his bare chest.

Hard cases make bad laws, Scully rationalizes. Any restrictions imposed on the two of them: on when and where and under what circumstances they are allowed to be in love, were probably destined from the start to be broken. Perhaps designed to be broken.

She steps up to him and squares her shoulders. Maybe this is reconciliatory after all, she thinks, reaching up to grab the back of his neck. She remembers his silhouette hunched miserably under the night sky and suddenly she wants to make it up to him. To make him shiver again. To pull him to the floor...

Mulder gives her his tragic, hero-with-a-thousand-faces smile. “Your move, Red.”

She thumbs the line of hair down his stomach to the waistband of his jeans. Drags her fingernails down the nape of his neck and tries to match the pace of both descents. How’s that for tacit agreement, she thinks.

Mulder’s blink rate is approaching 0. His mouth is slightly open and his shoulders rise and fall like he just swam a mile. She watches something quicken in him: an autonomic response to stimuli, like an amphetamine rush.

“You should tell me to leave, Scully.”

“Leave Mulder,” she says, the back of her wrist moving against his boxers as she works his button fly one-handed. “We’re on a case.”

He glances over to the door, then back at her mouth. She can see his heartbeat at the side of this throat, like a morse code from under his skin.

“My doctor says I have crummy impulse control.”

“Well,” Scully says wryly. “She’s one to talk.”

Mulder smiles, vouchsafed, and puts his nose between her eyebrows.

Scully’s heart is kicking and her ears buzz with the sound of her own blood pressure. What is more absurd, she wonders: that they’re doing this, or that they keep pretending they might not?

His hands are on her back. His hot mouth is against hers. She is burned but she is not consumed.

What else is going on right this minute, she wonders, as she grips him through his shorts and he groans against her neck. Ground water is creeping under her feet. Meteorites are arching unobserved toward earth. The galaxy is bleeding ever-outward in a gradual, muffled expansion. If a million solar systems are born every hour then surely hundreds must have burst into being in the time it takes her to pull him by the belt loops to the bed...

Mulder is kneeling on top of her with a sex flush creeping up his chest, his capillaries alight. The sun’s surface is roiling. Earth’s mountains are eroding at a rate of one one-thousandth of an inch per year.

They are both breathing hard and winds are blowing over prairies and across oceans: the polar easterlies, the roaring forties, the northeast and southeast trades. The pampero, and the tramontane. The Boro and the levanter and the sirocco.

His hands are pinning hers to the sheets and somewhere dust storms are raging, blanketing cities. She can hear pounding: the thunderous migrations of bighorn sheep and steppe bison and roosevelt elk. A team of horse's hooves ringing hollow on baked clay. Some dark mass moving through the late centennium.

Distant stars implode and vanish, taking with them the light of other days. And in a cheap motel room in New Hampshire the pair of them are gasping, lost, retreating into watercolor depth. Mulder’s back is sweaty. She bites his trapezius and it tastes like salt and heat, and, most profoundly, like the present.

__________________

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —  
Success in Circuit lies  
Too bright for our infirm Delight  
The Truth's superb surprise  
As Lightning to the Children eased  
With explanation kind  
The Truth must dazzle gradually  
Or every man be blind —

\- Emily Dickinson

__________________

 

Somewhere in the heat of the equator, in the belt of the horse latitudes, the ocean is flat and calm.

They sprawl on the rough synthetic bedspread and watch a glacially-paced documentary about Singing Sand. Mulder is half on and half off the bed, his head in Scully’s armpit and his toes brushing the mixed beige of the carpet. She has a hand in his hair and she absently clenches fistfulls of it as she watches TV, like a James Bond vamp warming him up for the rubber hose.

He feels a refractory pulse of attraction, and realizes he will likely spend the rest of his life intermittently crushed by Dana Scully. She has that effect on people: on serial killers and small town sheriffs and gas station dogs. On dudes in bodegas and heart-sick professors. She is Helen, beset at every turn by men who would take one look at her face and gladly set a match to Troy.

She’s been rocking a Johnny Cash look lately: black pants, black shirt, black boots, black coat. If the somber attire is supposed to make her look hot and also a little scary, Mulder thinks, it is working like a charm.

He’s been carrying this torch for so long that he sometimes forgets he’s holding it. It’s become a part of him, and maybe that’s why even now, ex post facto, he can’t put it down. He imagines willowy clumps of spina alba sprouting from the end of his arm like some lovelorn Bruce Campbell. The subterranean fires of Centralia, burning away for years on end. He remembers his concupiscent fugue state in Hollis’s greenhouse...Scully’s hand on the back of his neck. Her gasoline scented fingers on his chin. Christ, he thinks, it’s a wonder he ever gets any work done.

Onscreen David Attenborough is ankle deep in Kazakh dunes, the desert skyline behind him beautiful and unbroken.

Scully hand goes still in his hair and he looks up to see if she’s still awake. Her eyes are closed, and Mulder tilts his head until the small gold crucifix at her neck looks like a distorted letter X. An hour ago he would have given his left nut to see her face in the dark...

He feels disheartened. Lately he’s begun to suspect that some divine irony is afoot. That Scully may have unwittingly become a kind of perennial fixture in the universe. That she may, in fact, be immutable. He has imagined her down in the basement long after he discorporates; frowning at lab results and making sure payroll is submitted on time. A fantasy, he realizes now. If Scully really was deathless she’d spend eternity on something grander than the X-Files.

“What?” she asks, sensing his stare through closed eyelids.

Mulder swallows. “Now I should leave, huh?”

She sighs and arches her head back against the pillows, rolling her neck to one side and then the other. “Do what you want.”

The way she says it sounds less like permission, and more like a dare.

“Seriously?” he asks.

“I think we’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

“You Catholics and your original sin.”

Something in her neck pops. “What do you think is the wisest course of action, Mulder?”

He doesn’t know about wise, but he thinks he would gladly stagger barefoot through a desert or two if it meant he could stay. He feels himself shrug, which is a neat trick given that he doesn’t feel very casual.

“I guess I’m starting to think the horse has bolted, and we’re closing the barn doors out of habit.” He gets up on one elbow so he can better read her expression. “What do you think?”

She looks up at him, eyes hooded and skeptical.

“I don’t know what to think. Frankly, I’m a little concerned we’re losing our edge. But then... I don’t know what exactly we’re supposed to be afraid of anymore. Spender spoke to me like he already knew. If I had to venture a guess I’d say we’ve been made.”

She’s probably right. For a shadow operative the Smoking Man is not particularly adept at keeping secrets. Mulder remembers the old man’s patronizing drawl and his teeth go sour. He feels the veins in his arms begin to pound.

“I’m afraid,” Scully says in summation. “That we’re going to be punished for this.”

“Fear is the mind-killer,” Mulder says. “What do you think?”

What he likes about talking to Scully is, she takes her time to think before she answers. What he hates about talking to Scully is, that then has to wait around with his stomach in a ball for her to answer. She cuts both ways, he thinks, wishing they could mindspeak.

She squeezes her eyes shut and half smiles up at the ceiling. “I want to believe that if an audit is the worst they can throw at us, we’ve already won.”

Mulder grins. “Atta girl.”

Scully’s eyes are still closed, but she gives the ceiling a blink-and-you-missed-it nano-smile. “If you’re staying, get the lights,” she says.

__________________

But see, amid the mimic rout,  
A crawling shape intrude  
A blood-red thing that writhes from out  
The scenic solitude

\- Edgar Alan Poe  
__________________

 

Sometime in the night the world cracks in half, and Scully wakes to the sound of an earthquake. A landslide.

She checks the time on the alarm clock. Mulder is already suiting up: pulling a polar fleece over his bare chest and toeing on his boots.

She follows him out to the motel balcony. There is a rumbling all around them, an echoing, and Scully thinks of trees falling. Of Satan rising from the burning lake.

At the back of the building there are a few cars parked by the dumpsters. At the edge of the lot is a concrete retaining wall and then the land falls steeply away into a dark valley. The thundering is louder, punctuated by the sound of splitting timber. Are she and Mulder the only ones awake, Scully wonders? Where the hell is everyone?

And then she sees it in the distance: sliding down the hillside, pines bending and snapping before it like waves cresting at the bow of some horrible dreadknought; the hills groaning apocryphally as it descends.

It is impossible to comprehend, Daedalean in its complexity: a house-sized horror vacui of tentacles and ropey moving tendrils, half rolling, half lurching through the trees. It reminds her of intestines, of balls of mating serpents, of the inside of a baseball. Mulder was right, she thinks: it does sound like cannons firing.

Subconsciously she puts her left hand between her collar bones and her right to her gun, though the thing must be almost a mile away: a living boulder crossing the moonlit landscape.

Even from this distance it is terrible. Her id is screaming, telling her to turn and run, and Scully humors it by taking a half step back, her brain grasping desperately for an explanation, any explanation...

“Oh my God,” she whispers.

“It must be massive…” Mulder says, holding his gun at low ready.

Her brain distantly registers some incongruity, but she cannot pinpoint where. All marginal thought is drowned out by the fight-or-flight civil war raging in her amygdala.

“Wait,” Mulder says, double-taking. He squints down at her and then up at the trees bending on the hill, trying to follow her line of sight. His hand is on her shoulder, gripping urgently. “Wait, Scully -- Do you see it?!”

There is a moment of silence. Neither of them breathes.

This cannot be, she thinks.

“Mulder…” she says finally. “Do you not?”

The thing is perfectly, horribly visible, its progress down the hillside rampant, a path of destruction in its wake... A trail in the mud, as it were. A threshing-main upon the mire.

“Scully...” Mulder says, in an awed whisper.

This cannot be. She refuses to believe it.

Before her the thing moves in fits and starts. A nightmarish bleb descending from on high; a ball of claggy matter oozing downhill. A writhing, blob of a monster. A monster to beat all monsters...

...A monster that is somehow invisible to Fox W. Mulder: he who once told her that her radiators were haunted. Who claims to have seen cryptids on city busses. Who never met a fish story he didn't like.

This cannot be. It is impossible. A curveball. A striking twist of fate. This is not the general order of things, not the universe’s modus vivendi. She can almost hear the three Moirai laughing it up. Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness. Megafauna my ass, Scully thinks.

For his part, Mulder appears equally floored.

“Scully…!” he marvels, apparently lost for additional words. He looks up at the widening gash in the wooded hillside, shaking his head slowly, as if he’s finally found something he can’t believe.

“Holy fucking shit...” he breathes, rolling back on his heels at the enormity of it all. “Scully can see it.”

__________________

The darkness drops again; but now I know  
That twenty centuries of stony sleep  
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  
\- W. B. Yeats  
__________________

 

“Shucks,” Mulder says plainly. His gloves are tucked under his arm and he’s juggling a flashlight, a gun, the keys. He grunts in frustration and deposits the light on the roof of the rental, bulb-up at the stars like a searchlight. A reverse tractor beam.

Somewhere off down the road comes a rumbling, a dark oscillation, and Scully feels the vibration of it in her eardrums and in the arches of her feet. This cannot be happening, she thinks.

There’s wind in the trees and the knotroot on the side of the road ebbs like a wave and for a moment her worldview welters. Her right brain draws a diagram of it: the chasm separating beauty and essence folds in on itself, folds in half, and suddenly there is no distance left. The ant on the shoelace takes a single shaking step and then the lace doubles and the running ends meet. The journey is completed the moment it begins.

It strikes her as funny, how and when epiphanies come. That the gömböc of her psyche finds its equilibrium not through prayer or mediation, but instead by way of an all-night globster hunt. Monster moshka. Or, if she chooses to be reductionist about it: the combination of low blood sugar, adrenaline and Mulder’s quirky duende; alchemized into a neurochemical approximation of synchronicity. Eureka, she thinks. From the Greek, _I have found it_.

Mulder has the doors unlocked now, and he looks at her puzzled. He cants his head and the wind rises up around them both and pulls at her coat. The hills roll in the distance. The Gods are bowling.

For a long, hanging moment she can see it again: the beauty in all things. The wind and the way the deep weeds on the side of the road move together. The warm belly skin of the puppy and the sun already gone behind a mountain. The sky and the moon and the rangy gnostic biting his bottom lip at her over the roof of the car.

She feels as if she has always been here: standing with him by the side of the road under wind-rent clouds. Above them, something tangled and old as time moves in the trees, making the mountains groan. As long as she lives, she thinks, she will never forget the sound.

__________________

You've seen the refugees going nowhere,  
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.  
You should praise the mutilated world.  
Remember the moments when we were together

  
\- Adam Zagajewski  
__________________ 

Mulder listens to the sky quake and watches Scully linger at the passenger door. She is white as gypsum and still as the Cardiff giant, and he decides that whatever she's doing it is probably best he not interrupt. Lately he has wondered if her mercurial kemmer and her meaningful pauses could be causatum: a side effect of freshly acquired immortality. Her psyche adjusting to an increased intimacy with the nature of time.

Another voice - a quieter voice - wonders if it isn’t the immortality at all. Wonders if it might be hormonal. Might be hCG.

  __________________

“Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast,  
And each will wrestle for the mastery there.”

\- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  
__________________

 

“But you saw it, Scully!”

“I’m not denying that, Mulder. I’m saying...I’m appropriately skeptical of what I saw.”

Mulder closes his eyes and gestures broadly at an imaginary book cover. “Appropriately Skeptical: The Life and Times of Agent Dana Scully.”

The car rockets through the void, and damn it if he’s not looking at her again, instead of at the road. Her last epiphany was fleeting, and she feels irritable in its wake. She recalls Mephistopheles, his transfiguration behind the stove. The puppy at the gas station. Faust’s bargain: if he was pleased enough with anything the devil gave him that he wished to remain there forever, he would die in that moment. Nothing lasts forever, she thinks, although seven years is a damn good run.

She thinks about the tentacles on the hill and seethes inwardly. This is not how it’s supposed to work, she reminds herself. How it’s supposed to work is: Mulder walks in on his alleged monster. Catches it doing whatever it is monsters do when they think no one is looking. Communes with it in his Muldery way, like Orpheus charming the beasts with his lyre.

Then she’s supposed to sweep in a moment later: just in time to see the bushes move, a puff of smoke, the glimpse of a shadowy figure as it rounds the corner and disappears into the fog.

She has settled comfortably into this error in syncopation; like catching every red light on your morning commute. She decided long ago that it was probably a matter of gait: Mulder has longer legs and she’s permanently a half step behind him, so maybe that explains seven and a half years of ill-timed entrances. “Missed it by _that_ much,” he had teased her once, in his best Don Adams.

For hundreds of years, she thinks, biology was a visual science: before there were microscopes and Punnett squares and deep sea research vessels, biology was based solely on the observable world.

“You saw it,” Mulder broken records, checking his blindspot. “Holy shit, Scully.”

Not like this, she thinks. This is not how the world works.

“I saw nothing,” she tells him coldly.

Mulder gives her a look that says he isn’t buying it.

“Road!” she insists, wondering if tonight will be the night he wraps the car around a telephone pole.

Mulder looks at the road. He waits a beat.

“...What did ‘nothing’ look like, Colonel Klink?”

She takes a breath and lets it out. “It looked nothing like a globster,” she says with finality.

Mulder seems to take this news in stride.

Scully glances, just for a second, at the night passing through her window and when she looks back up at the windshield it is already too late: the thrashing mass fills the road ahead and their rental car is on a collision course, the distance closing impossibly fast.

She flings out her arms, bracing herself against the car door and lifting out of her seat in terror.

She screams his name.

In a credit to both his reflexes and his blind faith in her, Mulder slams the brakes without hesitation. He does it unquestioningly and based on zero visuals: going on nothing but the terror in her voice.

The tires scream and the anti-locks fail and the rental skids counterclockwise across the double yellow. The car is out of control, hurling towards the grotesque in the road, and Scully watches as the writhing wall looms larger, its ropey appendages clutching at empty air. Up close it is even more horrible than she had imagined: something ancient and benthic, that does not belong in this century. A living nightmare.

They are going to hit it, Scully sees, and the instant that she accepts it as inevitable all further reason leaves her.

Suddenly she has no doubt that it exists. Can imagine that it has existed for eons. Sees it resting in dappled sunlight, pulsing gently in a boulder-choked gorge. Waking at sundown and starting its nightly descent: clearing a path through the trees in long, undulating reaches - propelled by mysterious forces and compelled by who knows what motive. Around it the profound bass of falling branches and snapping boles booms like a waterfall, accompanied by the quick, tense vibrations of the pine-needles: now rising to a whistling hiss, now falling back to a murmur. It is stunning. Transcendent.

Scully feels her eyes widen. She braces for impact.

And then, like mist in the dawn, it falls away before her eyes. Vanishes.

Time slows to a crawl and the rental spins like a top. They pass through the space that moments before she could have sworn was a mob of writhing, grasping arms. Her stomach drops precipitously as they hit the spot that was noumenon moments before.

The rental skids to the edge of the road and then pitches, trunk-first, down an embankment. They are dragged backwards and down, and the forest is cacophonous around them: vines crashing and brush ripping hostily at the undercarriage.

Scully has time to wonder at the fact that they are still falling, and then she and Mulder are jarred violently against their seat belts as the back of the car crunches sickeningly against a sycamore and slams to a halt.

  
______________________________________________________

 

For a minute they sit perfectly still. Then Scully releases a fistful of Mulder’s sleeve. He takes the hint and loosens his death-grip on her knee.

His hands are shaking on the steering wheel. “You okay?”

“Too soon to tell.” she tells him. “Adrenaline.”

Mulder swallows forcefully. “Hey Scully,” he says weakly. “Was there something in the road?”

______________________________________________________

 

It’s daylight by the time the cops leave. And the ambulances. And the single inexplicable fire truck, which arrived late on the scene and which Mulder assumes must have come only to satisfy the curiosity of the volunteers on call, because there were already boatloads of first responders.

The red sun hangs low over the horizon like a penny. Like a fire in a stove. Mulder signs for the tow and tries to remember if the rental paperwork included a damage waiver. Scully would know.

He looks to where she is standing at the bottom of the wooded dell. Her back is to him, and she is leaning against a rusty chain link fence, looking out over a muddy river. Some smitten EMT had insisted on giving her a concussion test and a mylar blanket, and now she is blinding in the sunlight: wrapped in a billowing silver toga like some futuristic techno God. She looks like a vengeful Persephone come to rest: like it was her hand and not the runaway rental that split a ragged path through the thorny copse. She stands, becalmed, in the midst of her destruction.

Mulder runs a quick cost benefit analysis on bothering her and arrives at the same conclusion he always does.

 __________________

Have you entered into the springs of the sea,  
or walked in the recesses of the deep?  
Have the gates of death been revealed to you,  
or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?  
Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?  
Declare, if you know all this.

Job 38:16-18  
__________________

 

Morning hangs like a lamp in a dark place, and Scully watches the low sun move over the water.

“Salam” Mulder says, joining her at the fence and peering down into the riprap. He taps his temple, “How’s the gordian knot?”

The gesture reminds her of the time she found him wrapped in gauze post-neurosurgery; his gorked-out expression on the stainless steel slab. A scalpel to the brain pan, she thinks. The Alexandrian solution.

“Unraveling,” she answers.

“Sorry I wrecked the car...” Mulder says, looking back over his shoulder at the accordioned sedan being winched up the flatbed.

Scully frowns down at her hands on the metal toptube. “Well, I made you wreck it. It’s more my fault then yours.”

“I would love to be there,” Mulder tells her earnestly, “When you explain that to the auditor next week.”

A ball of midges swarms above the water and a clutch of bait fish and river eels hang just below the sunlit glass surface. Scully is not surprised to see Mulder peering down at the throng of spiny back-fins below them with something resembling wonder.

“I’ve been rationalizing your skyquakes,” she tells him.

“Oh have you?”

“Mmm-hmm. They’re like a donut.”

Mulder blinks serenely down at the water. “I give up,” he says finally.

“A donut is meaning we ascribe an object that is defined by empty space. A name for a void. The creation of something from nothing. After a bolt of lightning passes through the air the particles displaced rush back in to fill the gap. People hear the sound, and in their desperation to explain they make guesses about what the sound might mean. Assign it religious or spiritual or teleological meaning.”

“Skyquakes,” he sums up.

Scully shrugs. “Or thunder. Nature abhors a vacuum. The same could be said about the human mind.”

“Deep. So are you suggesting that you and and Hollis collectively willed something big and gooey into existence? To fill some psychic void?”

“I guess that is something peripheral to what I’m saying, Mulder. Yes.”

He nods slowly, looking out over the river. “Cool,” he says. “I can live with that.”

Mark your calendars, Scully thinks, it’s Armistice day.

“Why couldn’t I see it?” Mulder wonders aloud. He turns to her, clasping his hands in false prayer. “Enlighten me, Our Lady of Continual Near-Misses.”

“I don’t know why,” she tells him.

“Oh come on, Scully, humor me.”

She closes her eyes and thinks about the wall of tentacles. She remembers it stage-lit in the beam of the headlights: the resplendent collage of pink and white and red, all coated in a translucent gelatinousness both clear and yellow, the color of amniotic fluid.

She sighs and tries to think like he would. “Because... because you believed in it all along? So there was no void to fill?” The moon monster’s satirical second act, she supposes. Something foreordained.

“See?” he says, bumping her shoulder. “Kind of fun, right? Soon you won't even need me...”

Case closed, Scully thinks, because this feels like one of those X-Files that will be “solved” in the sense that the cryptid has skipped town, and they’re not going to bother to chase it.

“What about your squidmen, Mulder?”

“I don’t know about them,” he admits. “I guess maybe there never were any squidmen. Credit where credit is due.”

Mulder goes to put an arm around her like they’re not in public, then catches himself and plays it off as a stretch instead. The suppressed gesture makes her sad, and on impulse she slips her hand under his where it rests on the fence, threading the two of them together. In her peripheral vision Mulder bites back a smile.

They hunch over the fence like a pair of feeding lions and watch the fish lilt around in the underwater light.

“You’ll have to type this one up,” Mulder tells her. “I’m still trying to figure out how to spin my Ifrit...”

“Your Ifrit?” she asks. If he’s talking about the rug genie then that report is nearly a week overdue.

“No,” he says with a goofy grin. “I’m not. Are you?”

Scully rolls her eyes. She watches the water and thinks about how eels spawn. In the summer the battleworn among them will stop eating. Will turn silver. Will ease their way down rivers and estuaries, all the way out to the Atlantic, bound for the Sargasso Sea. In the deepest waters of the ocean they will release their gametes en masse into floating sargassum weed, and then soon afterwards they will die; their silver bodies turning white and ghostly and washing up on foreign shores.

Below the eels the dark, mossy shapes of rocks trail algal steamers against the river’s pull. Scully squeezes Mulder’s sweaty palm and considers the fleeting current.

__________________

“And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.”

\- William Faulkner  
__________________

**Author's Note:**

> With many apologies to Penumbra, whose mummy and Mars rock I ganked. 
> 
> And with many apologies to the writer from whom I borrowed some winds and some animals, and some light in the dark.
> 
> ...Also whose scene is that I stole? The one with the Dots and the Kepler orbits? I wanted so badly to write it, but I’m pretty sure it isn't actually mine, and that I read it somewhere else a long time ago. If it’s yours, message me and I’ll publicly apologize and extract it from this story post-haste.
> 
> There is a glaring poetry continuity error in this, that cannot be explained. Maybe we can chalk it up to that unclassified X-File concerning Melissa Scully and her fantastic DeLorean.


End file.
